“People know how to create and innovate, but don’t know how to commercialize,” says John Ochs, professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics, who helped develop the curriculum. “A product doesn’t do any good until it gets to the market. In this program, we surround that spark of an idea with the right tools and experience to help make that leap.”

TE helps young entrepreneurs create, refine and commercialize intellectual property through the licensing or launching of a new business. After completing the program’s first session in the summer, students are eligible to compete for thousands of dollars in seed funding, some of which is available only to students in the program.

As with other Lehigh’s other entrepreneurial programs, Ochs and his colleagues used the “human-centered design thinking” process of IDEO, a global design consulting firm, to help shape the TE curriculum.

IDEO is listed among America’s Top 25 Most Innovative Companies by Bloomberg BusinessWeek and ranks #16 on Fortune’s list of the 100 MBA employers where students say they would most like to work. On its website, IDEO sums up its philosophy as follows: “Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way.”

Students in the Baker Institute visited IDEO during their LehighSiliconValley immersion trip to California earlier this year. Adam Mack ‘06, a mechanical design engineer at IDEO, hosted that event.

“The professional environment is changing,” he says. “In the tech-driven, flat-world economy we live in, small and mid-sized firms are contributing to the global economy as never before. For today’s students, entrepreneurial thinking won’t be a luxury post-graduation—it will indeed be a way of life.”